Moving from TI Linux to Debian on a custom board

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1

Somewhat off-topic for a BeagleBoard forum, but I hope I can get some help.

I have a custom board (loosely based on a BeagleBone Black). With the help of the guys on TI’s e2e forum, I was able to bring it up and test all the peripherals using their TI Linux SDK. This basically involved editing the device tree files and adding the Broadcom PHY driver in menuconfig.

So now everything works running TI Linux, but I’d like to go to a ‘real’ Debian distro for the package support (4.4 kernel).

  1. How would I go about doing this?
  2. Can I use the u-boot (MLO, u-boot.img) that I already have, or does it need to be matched with the Linux distro?

I put this in the ‘Newbie’ section because that’s what I am, lol. But, maybe this will need an expert answer.

Thanks!

2

There are 3 parts; bootloader, kernel and rootfs.. They are "mostly"
independent of each other, (ext4/systemd makes a few dependices on
each other)

Otherwise just follow this guide, and swap what you need.

https://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black

Regards,

3

Ok, I have it mostly working now, but I could not use the u-boot from that guide and had to use the u-boot from TI Linux.
The guide’s u-boot worked, but my PHY was only working at 100mbit. It would link at 1Gbit and Linux would say that it’s connected, but it would not get an IP through dhcp. As soon as I used the TI Linux u-boot, it worked fine at 1Gbit.
I’d like to figure out what u-boot is doing to affect this? Any ideas? The TI Linux is also designed to run on the BBB. The only thing I changed in both is changing V_OSC to 25000000 from 24000000 since I am using a 25MHz clock.

Thanks.